Christos Lynteris

Christos Lynteris is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. His research focuses on the anthropological and historical examination of epidemics, zoonosis, epidemiological epistemology, medical visual culture, colonial medicine, and pandemics as events posing an existential risk to humanity.

Christos holds the first chair in medical anthropology at the University of St Andrews. Focusing on diseases that spread between animals and humans, his research has been foundational in the establishment of the anthropological study of zoonosis. Combining archival and ethnographic research together with visual methods and critical approaches to medical and epidemiological epistemologies, Professor Lynteris's research seeks to understand how both specific zoonotic diseases (SARS, Covid-19, plague) and zoonosis more broadly shape social worlds and are in turn shaped by them.

Funded by the Wellcome Trust with an Investigator Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Christos's new project (2019-2025) The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis examines the global history of a foundational but historically neglected process in the development of scientific approaches to zoonosis: the global war against the rat (1898-1948). He is also Co-Investigator of the three-year research project Developing Effective Rodent Control Strategies to Reduce Disease Risk in Ecologically and Culturally Diverse Rural Landscapes (2021-2023) funded by the UKRI/Medical Research Council.

Previously, he was PI of the ERC-funded project Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic at CRASSH, University of Cambridge (2013-2018). You can view the Visual Plague Photographic Database online and open access now via the Cambridge University Library Repository.